Dr. Dobb's Data Compression Newsletter - Issue #17 - April 2001

, August 13, 2001

DDJ Data Compression Newsletter Issue #17

Welcome to this issue of the DDJ Data Compression Newsletter.

Although the Web gets most of the press devoted to the Internet, we
old-timers still rely on Usenet newsgroups for some forms of information.
The newsgroup comp.compression regularly hosts intelligent comments, breaking
news, and timely information that keeps me up to date on the world of
data compression.

Early this month, a post from David Taubman caught my eye. David was
plugging a commercial library he created that implements the JPEG-2000
standard. Here is a copy of his post:

Those of you interested in the new JPEG2000 image compression
standard may find the Kakadu software tools very interesting. Kakadu is
a fully compliant (barring any remaining bugs) implementation of JPEG2000
Part-1, optimized for speed, memory consumption and flexibility. Kakadu
may well be the fastest and least memory hungry implementation of the
standard currently available.

This C++ implementation is created by D. Taubman, the initial and
principle author of the official JPEG2000 verification model software
(VM) and author, with M. Marcellin, of a forthcoming comprehensive book
on image processing and JPEG2000. Dr. Taubman has made numerous contributions
to the development of the JPEG2000 standard, including the EBCOT (Embedded
Block Coding with Optimized Truncation) algorithm, from which many of
the standard's key ingredients are drawn. The Kakadu software benefits
from Dr. Taubman's intimate familiarity with the principles, the text
and the implementation of this new standard.

Comprehensive software development tools are available for a modest
license fee, while some interesting demonstration applications (including
a highly functional interactive viewer) are freely downloadable. For
more details, visit the Kakadu web site at http://maestro.ee.unsw.edu.au/~taubman/kakadu.

Although the JPEG-2000 standard has been widely discussed, we haven't
seen too much in the way of commercial products that support it. So this
announcement was pretty interesting to me.

Like many of its users, Usenet goes back a long time, and part of its
heritage is a decidedly anti-commercial bent. It isn't that Usenet posters
are against free enterprise, but there is a prevalent feeling that using
this part of the Internet for purely commercial purposes is in bad taste.

So naturally, a post of this nature resulted in a few quibbles about
whether a commercial JPEG-2000 library was a good thing.

Ken Prager writes:
> You are paying for his *implementation* which has been optimized for
> speed and memory consumption. If you don't want to pay the fees then
get
> a copy of the freely available standard and write the code yourself.

"Freely available standard"? Since when have ISO standards been available
for free? They've always charged for them (and quite a lot, too).

But that's just a quibble. Here's my two cents on the main point:

I have no objection to people charging whatever they think the market
will bear for the products of their labor. However, you seem to be paying
insufficient attention to the question of how big that market will be.
Do you really believe that those folk who made money from proprietary
implementations of JPEG would have stayed in business if only proprietary
implementations were available? Face it: they'd have sunk without a
trace, because the market would have been tiny or nonexistent. The fact
that there was a pretty good freely available implementation is what
allowed the market for JPEG to be large enough to support proprietary
implementations. Let me give you just one illustration of that fact:
without the IJG library, JPEG would be a non-presence on the World Wide
Web. The browser makers would have settled on some other image format(s)
instead. How many people would give a damn about JPEG if it weren't
in use on the Internet?

I don't think the JPEG 2000 group has really absorbed this point,
and in consequence I suspect that JPEG 2000 may go the way of a lot
of other not-so-successful standards. It'll be used in a few marginal
products, and it may or may not make a few people money, but it won't
take over the world.

In five or ten years, we'll see who was right. Want to make a side
bet on whose code is still in use on the Web in 2005?

regards,
tom lane
organizer, Independent JPEG Group

For those who don't know, Tom Lane is a big kahuna in the Independent
JPEG Group, who wrote an incredibly influential library of JPEG routines.
The IJG library is used high and low by anyone who wants to render or
create JPEG images.

Given Tom's stature, this post should be considered thoughtfully. Is
Tom right? Can the absence of high-quality, free code stop a technically
superior technology dead in its tracks?

That's a pretty big question, and I only have enough time to pose it
this month. Next month I'm planning to talk to Tom a little bit about
his position, and what he's learned from history. I also hope to check
out the Taubman library, and let you know whether it might have a chance
to help advance the JPEG-2000 standard.

I'd love to hear your opinions on the matter. Is a high-quality, free
implementation of JPEG-2000 required to get the standard off the ground?
If so, who's going to take on the admittedly thankless job of making that
happen? Let me know what you think! As always, your comments are welcome
at markn@ieee.org.